STEM to STEAM

Maverick Thinker Wraps Up Shared Voices

03/09/2012

Kevin Kelly is currently “Senior
Maverick” at Wired, the magazine he
co-founded in the early 1990s. The title is an apt one: Kelly was exploring
cyberspace in the early ’80s – before most people even knew it existed – while
also writing the futurist classic Out of
Control in the early ’90s. These days he publishes Cool Tools, among other blogs, and is working
with Long Now, a foundation that promotes long-term thinking. And this just
scratches the surface of his nonconformist interests.

As the
third and final speaker in the new Shared Voices series, Kelly will visit RISD on Wednesday, March 14. In a talk titled Screen Fluency, he’ll discuss the importance of visual and
multimedia literacy in a world where digital screens dominate how we access
information.

Truly a
Renaissance man for the digital age, Kelly now lives on the west coast – in
Pacifica, CA. After dropping out of the University of Rhode Island in 1971, he
traveled throughout Asia as a photojournalist, eventually publishing some 400
of his photographs in a wordless book called Asia Grace. “Instead of going to college, I went to Asia,” he has
said.

In the 1980s, Kelly’s fascination with technology drew him into the nascent
years of cyber culture. He
edited the Whole Earth Review, a
journal of unorthodox technical news that reported on new trends – like virtual
reality and artificial intelligence – long before any other publications, and
he published new issues of the Whole
Earth Catalog, the world-renowned compendium of the best tools for
self-education, a countercultural favorite created in the ’70s by his friend
and colleague Stewart Brand.

Kelly’s techno vision has inspired more than one
futuristic, dystopian Hollywood film. His first book, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the
Economic World (1994, Addison Wesley),
was required reading (along with two others) for the cast of The Matrix, the 1999 film starring Keanu Reeves. For the film Minority
Report (2002), director Steven Spielberg got him and a group of other futurists together to
brainstorm what the year 2054 would look like.

These
days, much of Kelly’s attention is focused on the Long Now Foundation, where he
and Brand co-host a seminar series. A nonprofit established in “01996” to fight
the short-term thinking that drives most organizations, Long Now is creating a
digital library of human languages and building a clock that will last 10,000
years. Kelly also speaks widely about technology, science, business and culture,
and writes on these and other topics for such publications as The New York
Times, The Economist, Time, Esquire, Harpers, Science, GQ and The Wall Street Journal.

Kelly’s thinking
has evolved and expanded into numerous books, including his latest, What Technology Wants (2010,
Viking/Penguin), which looks at technology as a living, breathing organism that
is malleable to our own needs. In addition, his bestselling book New Rules for
the New Economy (1998, Viking/Penguin) has been translated into
multiple languages.

Registration for Kelly’s presentation
on March 14 is already full, but his talk will be webcast live on the Shared Voices site and archived there after
the event.